March 17, 2022 — Glenn Cooke is the CEO of Cooke Inc., a vertically integrated family of seafood companies based in Blacks Harbour, New Brunswick, Canada. He spoke to SeafoodSource on Tuesday, 15 March, at the 2022 Seafood Expo North America/Seafood Processing North America in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
SeafoodSource: What have been Cooke’s big moves over the past few months?
Cooke: We’re always investing in our operations globally and we just launched a vessel for Argentine red shrimp fishery with the capability to do frozen-at-sea product, which is quite exciting, as we’ll be in this year’s fishery there. It’s a state-of-the-art vessel. We’re in the process of finalizing a new USD 45 million (EUR 40.5 million) plant in St. George, New Brunswick for salmon added-value processing that will be very robotized, automatic, and cut down our labor costs, which we have do because of a shortage of [workers]. The facility that’s there will be replaced by a brand-new facility and the one that’s there will be redone into a secondary value-added processing center. And we have a new smolt unit almost ready to be finalized as well in New Brunswick. Around the world, we are expanding our operations – we’re always investing heavily globally and we’ll continue to do that.